The Mezzanine

This book reinterprets Nicholson Baker’s 1982 novella The Mezzanine, which pursues non sequiturs and tangents to their fullest extent to highlight the intricacies of the mundane. 

Inspired by Baker’s vivid writing, I documented the process of the book’s design through 25 inserts of my own, centered around the items that sparked my interest as I worked on it. These inserts interrupt the text like Baker’s own rambling footnotes, and emerge from the center of a spread, completing the halved images that poke out onto the left pages. On the reverse side of each insert, my writing wraps around the silhouette of each object, barely visible through the paper. 

Anchoring the book’s design is a consistent system, within which the main text flows along right pages and footnotes run vertically between left pages, like a directed scavenger hunt. Moments of gradual motion, like changes in the width of the inserts, the position of the running chapter marker and the orientation of each chapter’s opening spread, recall the small-scale events of the book, and evoke the repeated image of the escalator. The cover hints at the insert system within, with a monochromatic laser-engraved design that gives it a textural and dimensional quality.

Completed May 2025For RISD Graduate Type Studio II
Under direction of Lucinda Hitchcock